1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an apparatus and a method for sealing a folded sheet of paper with paste using an adhesive.
2. Description of the Related Art
Direct mail is an advertising method that has rapidly become widespread due to a convenience of being sent to an individual target person utilizing reliability of postal mail. In recent years, however, since many corporations and stores utilize the direct mails, each house receives several to several tens of direct mails a day in some cases.
In the case of the sealed direct mail, since it is troublesome to open every envelope, there is a tendency that many receivers discard the envelopes without opening them. When senders such as corporations send sealed direct mail, since they also enclose greetings, catalogs or reply cards in the envelopes, there is a problem that costs of the catalogs and operation costs for enclosing these sheets of paper become expensive.
In addition to the direct mail that is sent in the sealed state as described above, recently, there are direct mail and information concealing postcards which are directly mailed without being put into envelopes and in which folded pieces of folded sheets of paper are adhered to each other by means of pressure-sensitive pseudo-adhesive such that they can peel off from each other if a predetermined pressure is applied thereto (Japanese Patent Application Laid-open No. H5-201179). The folded sheet of paper can be mailed as mail as it is at a normal postcard fee, and a receiver thereof can easily check its contents by peeling the both folded pieces off. That is, this is advantageous in terms of costs as compared with a case where a sheet of paper is sent in an envelope, and this is convenient for both sender and receiver.
When advertisements or catalogs in which it is unnecessary to conceal information are sent by direct mail, there is a way to fold the advertisement or the catalog, and they are sealed by means of an adhesive tape to save a receiver the trouble of opening the sealed letter (Japanese Patent Application Laid-open No. H7-290866). In this case, the receiver can read contents in the direct mail only by merely peeling off the tape, it is possible to expect to prevent wasteful dust from being generated, and since the sealed letter is not used, operation of putting letters into envelopes becomes unnecessary.
According to the direct mail or the information concealing postcards of Japanese Patent Application Laid-open No. H5-201179, an adhesive is previously applied to an entire surface of a folded piece, an entire surface of a folded surface is pressed by a roller that presses the entire surface of the folded surface to adhere the folded surface. Therefore, an application processing apparatus is required for an entire paper, and the roller for pressing the entire surface of the folded piece is necessary, a machine is increased in size and weight.
According to the direct mail of Japanese Patent Application Laid-open No. H7-290866, a seal becomes a cause of increasing costs, and although a machine for automatically pasting the seal to an open end of a folded sheet of paper is developed, there is a problem that its processing speed is slow.